Basically for fonts to look good when placed on a square grid (pixels) there is a method called hinting which as the name implies gives hints to the font renderer on how the fonts should be drawn across this grid in order to best preserve the intended look of the font and be readable, this has the greatest impact when you are using a very limited size grid such as in small font sizes.

As someone who has ADD: yes, font lingo. It has to do with render alignment and the fact that pixels aren't round. It is amazing the level of complexity underlying font rendering, look at the internals for lcd filter weights some time.

They say they keep updating it, which kind of makes me wonder what the best way is to keep up to date with the newest versions. Is there an automated way to do that? I don't like to manually check every other month if a font has a new version, and cloning the repo seems overkill if all I want is the output.

You say in another comment that you use Ubuntu. With Arch I'd make my own package to manage this, if one didn't exist. It's quite easy with Arch, but I'm not really sure whether that's the case with Ubuntu. I've definitely found packaging to be a skill worth having.

Not that many people respect font licensing, but the Roboto font has been Apache licensed since it was released (like the rest of AOSP and fonts previous to Roboto in Android). Moving to a full open production and tool chain is interesting though.

"Free and Open Source Software" (often abbreviated F/OSS) doesn't refer to two different features "free" and "open source", it attempts to bridge two different communities preferred terms for licensing with essentially identical features, OSI's "Open Source" [0] and FSF's "Free Software" [1].

Probably you can understand simply by looking at the urls anyway ;-). To say that F/OSS doesn't refer to 2 different features, "free" and "open source", is to advance only one of the viewpoints from the 2 movements.

As much as it would be convenient if it were not the case, "free software" and "open source" software do, in fact, refer to different (although similar) things in many people's minds.

I am not the right person to explain the differences and if gnu.org were not down I would simply point you to the arguments that the FSF have against referring to free software as "open source". However, I will do my best to explain. Please verify what I'm about to say when you get the opportunity.

The intent of free software is to ensure that all users and programmers can deal with the software on a level playing field. By this I mean that one programmer can not use legal or technical mechanisms to have more capability than another. Everybody has the same access and ability to run the software for whatever purpose they want. They can inspect the source code in an un-obfuscated way. They can modify it in any way. They can distribute it, along with their modifications, to others. Most importantly, they can not do anything that will take away these abilities (either through legal or technical means) from others.

The licenses in the free software movement are a means to that end. The free software movement defines licenses that are free (in other words licenses which do not impose restrictions that would remove the level playing field). Some licenses, though, are free in and of themselves, but do not actually stop people from working in a non-freedom-oriented way (I'm sure I am not the only person frustrated that there is no antonym for "free software" -- all commonly used ones being deprecated by the FSF).

For example, there are many licenses which are free licenses but which allow people to leverage the code in software that is not free. This creates an un-level playing field because those people can build on top of the software, extending it in a way that only they can use and then compete against the original project without being free. In other words, if project A is free software licensed with a permissive license, someone can make A+ which is essentially A but with more features. They can release this under a non-free license, competing against A and taking mind share without giving people the freedom to modify or distribute A+.

For this reason, people in the free software movement prefer some free licenses over others. Their entire reason for having the licenses in the first place is to avoid the situation described above.

The open source movement is not as concerned about the issue described above. While they advocate nearly identical methods, their goal is to encourage licenses that allow people to interoperate smoothly if they choose to do so.

In the open source movement, it is unreasonable to prefer licences that enforce software freedom over other OSI software licenses. In fact, many people in the open source movement consider these kinds of licenses to be undesirable because it stops them from using F/OSS to build products that are not free software -- in other words, they are diametrically opposed to software freedom and only cooperate in a similar fashion when it is advantageous for them.

In my opinion, the term "Free and Open Source Software" is useful for discussing the very large amount of area where the free software movement and the open source movement overlap. It is important not to conflate the two movements, though, because whether or not you value software freedom there are many people who do.

In my own usage, I prefer to use the term free software when I think that the freedom aspect of it is important. I use F/OSS when I am just talking about interoperating with people using free software/OSI licenses. I use OSS when I am talking about leveraging F/OSS into software that is not free.

The actual "Font" data lives in the `src/v2` directory. For example, open up "Roboto_Thin.ufo/glyphs" from here, and you'll see a lot of ".glyph" files. These are essentially SVG's it appears. The python script pulls this content together and generates appropriate font files (WOFF, TTF, etc).

I may be reading this wrong, but the only annoyance I would find with their toolchain is that it seems like their true source is the FontLab files which is not open source. The readme says that you should be able to edit the UFO files and generate the FontLab files from that, but it doesn't seem to be the process they are using. It would be nice for the UFO files to be the true source rather than a derived one.

Unfortunately, doing TrueType hinting more-or-less requires FontLab. There are other alternatives that are being developed, but by and large FontLab remains the industry tool for building TT-hints. Part of this talk by Tal Leming (https://vimeo.com/album/3329572/video/123781570#t=457s) explains some of the interchange issues with TT-hint formats. Long story short, everyone has a slightly different hinting compiler, and they're all proprietary.

I don't know specifics about this particular typeface (and I haven't been "into fonts" for a while), but Roboto is pretty much another typeface with some Grotesk (e.g. Helvetica) lineage. What can typically said about these sorts of new-fangled typefaces is that they're well-optimized for reading on screens and scale well to smaller sizes (that is to say, good for mobile). A simple example is that the x-height (i.e. the height the lowercase 'x', and thus roughly the height of most of the lowercase letters) is higher than a typeface made, say, sixty years ago. The x-height in this case looks to be about 70% - 75% the height of the capitals, which is pretty darned high.

Has anyone tried to release an app into the iOS Appstore which uses this font? It looks great in my app and I'd like to know if there are going to be problems with Apple if I use this for an iOS/Android multi-platform app .. anyone know?

I think it'd go down better if there was more there. This is a more tech focused site than an arty site. If you'd drilled down the ins and outs of the tech behind the font (How to compile it from the source maybe?) it would probably have been better received

Google has released literally 1000+ open source projects since then. These are just the ones that went through me in one way or another (IE that i have personal knowledge of).

So you may want to reevaluate your premise :)

You can't even argue "they didn't release anything major".
You may be able to argue "they didn't release anything I personally care about"

I went to go reply to the typical "name a whatever that google has released as open source since then", but the person deleted their comment after two people already named some.

Here, i'll double the number:

GRPC
Bazel
LevelDB
etc

There are 393 projects in the main google org on github since 2012. This doesn't count the ~55 other github orgs google owns, or the fact that at least triple that number were released on code.google.com in the same time period. If you can't find something that meets whatever criteria you want to lay out, not sure what to tell you.

Open sourcing a product by definition is not smart. A product is a solution to a problem that is meant to be sold. A library is a tool that enables others to make their own product but open sourcing for example Gmail would be the dumbest thing Google could ever do.

Open sourcing Android is arguably what made Android thrive and was amongst the smartest things that Google ever did, otherwise phone makers and careers would have continued preferring something they can have some control over, like Symbian. It's also arguably why Windows Phone is for the time being dead, with Android and iOS having a staggering 96% of the market, as nobody wants another tightly controlled platform/OS, as iOS itself fulfills that role pretty well and you can't beat Apple at its own game.

Open sourcing android was the only option they had as 1)Google support is non existent and 2)they didn't have the hardware or physical distribution at the time and 3)Apple showed the world how mobile operating systems should be done and making their OS closed would be playing a game of metoo which wouldn't let them stand out in any way. Also Google doesn't have any business motive to make profit off android because their whole business model is about selling user data.

if gmails source code is not its value what is it? I'm pretty sure gmails ability to search and functionality are what make it stand out which is easily replicable by taking the source code. If the source code isn't valuable, you're saying it's the brand that's valuable because without the actual product the only thing left is the gmail brand.

Gmail's value is the service it provides, which relies just as much on the infrastructure as the source code.

Back to your original statement - would you consider Linus dumb for open sourcing Linux? Open sourcing a product can be a very smart move - it gives certainty of supply, and encourages other enthusiasts to share the building of it.

Back in the day, silicon chip makers would allow their competitors to make copies of their chips so that consumers would know that if either company went bust they still could procure the chips they needed to build their products. If Google kept Roboto (and other elements of Android) closed, mobile phone makers would worry that if Google turned evil they could be left with hardware with no operating system.

And by open sourcing Roboto, the world's font enthusiasts get to play with it. Roboto has already evolved considerably within Google, and it's likely that this process will be accelerated with a wider set of participants.

So Google wins because it gets a better font for Android, and it's phone makers are happier to use Android. Seems like a smart move to me...

AOSP is still open-source, it's what allows CyanogenMod to exist, it's what allows Replicant to exist, it's why Amazon could fork it for their Fire OS and in terms of user experience, compared with both iOS and Windows Phone, it's the mobile OS that allows for third-party app stores, or that allows alternatives for "system" functionality, like the browser or the search app being used. It's also the only mobile OS on top of which the Firefox browser runs, a browser that supports extensions, like AdBlock Plus. This font itself is part of AOSP and it's been open-source for some time, licensed under APL 2, just like most of AOSP. Chromium and Chromium OS are also open-source. We are talking about another operating system that has been a success.

Not to be harsh, but Microsoft hasn't open-sourced anything of this magnitude or importance. And don't get me wrong, I like the direction of .NET, however we've been having Java / the JVM, with all the great languages built on top, like Scala, Clojure, JRuby, Groovy, Kotlin, Ceylon and with all the great projects built on top, like Hadoop, Cassandra, Lucene, Apache Spark to name a few and Android uses Java-the-ecosystem as well, so we've been fine without it.

But on the other hand, here's me holding in my hand a Windows device received as a gift and I can't install apps from third-party sources, I can't use my IMAP email account, not to mention IMAP IDLE, I can't use CardDAV or CalDAV (because Microsoft insists on their own patented and expensive ActiveSync), I can't change the default search engine and I'm browsing through an app store filled with shit which is supposed to be curated. And from the looks of it, Microsoft's Edge only supports extensions installed from this same store filled with shit, it won't be open-source and it won't be cross platform. And I also remember a time when Microsoft sponsored SCO in its lawsuit for the ownership of Linux and when Scott Hanselman writes an ironic article that's somehow proof enough that Microsoft hasn't killed my pappy, he conveniently forgets that Microsoft acts like a patent troll by blackmailing Android phone makers with the FAT patent and extracting from this act of racketeering more profit than from its Windows phones.

And I'm becoming more and more negative on Microsoft, even though I want to like some of the things they do, but this is the reaction I'm having lately because I fail to see how Microsoft is changing, even though everybody says so - as frankly I smell nothing more than a massive PR push and it's pissing me off. And btw - I've ranted on Google and Apple countless of times, one of these days I'll write about why I've shut down my Google Apps account, my standards are pretty consistent across the board ;-)

> I'm browsing through an app store filled with shit which is supposed to be curated.

Microsoft can't really put a gun to developers' heads and force them to write software for Windows Phone. If developers don't want to write non-shit software, then the store will only have shit software. There's only so much a company can do. iOS and Android app support is coming in Windows Mobile 10 (http://www.theverge.com/2015/4/29/8511439/microsoft-windows-...) with minimal changes necessary to get the apps working.

> And from the looks of it, Microsoft's Edge only supports extensions installed from this same store filled with shit, it won't be open-source and it won't be cross platform.

That's a sleight of hand you're trying to do... the link explains how to load an app from an SD card, not how to load a 3rd party app (that is, an app someone else made and gave or sold to you independent of Microsoft). According to Microsoft[1]:

"To enable sideloading on a Windows 8.1 Enterprise and Windows 8 Enterprise computer that is not domain-joined or on any Windows 8.1 Pro or Windows 8 Pro computer or on a Windows RT device, you must use a sideloading product activation key. For more information about acquiring sideloading product activation keys, see Microsoft Volume Licensing"

So, true third party sideloading is limited to enterprises. Microsoft is just as bad as Apple in terms of controlling what the consumers do with their phones.

You are talking about sideloading in Windows 8/RT, not Windows Phone 8.

You can also sideload third party apps without a sideloading activation key in Win8, it's how testing on devices is done. You get a developer certificate for yourself (completely free and one button press when you first try to sideload) and essentially self-sign the apps. It's not as simple as double clicking, but it's one Powershell command (Add-AppXPackage IIRC). It's much easier to sideload with the sideload activation key, yes, because sideloading as a whole seems to have been created for Enterprise App deployments, but it's fully possible without it. I believe the only restriction is you need to renew the developer certificate every few months.

I believe it's similar to the Windows 8 sideloading process, which is that it has to be created by a developer and using a marketplace ID, but the app does not necessarily need to be published on the marketplace. Otherwise, you wouldn't be able to test your apps on real devices prior to releasing them in the wild.

I'm sure if you have a paid app and try to sideload it, you'll need to own it on the marketplace (otherwise piracy, etc), but for a free or unpublished app, I believe it should work fine.

That's true, since of course developers need to be able to test their own applications, but that's hardly comparable to letting ordinary users install third-party apps, as you can on desktop Linux/Mac/Windows and Android.

Except for Apple's higher developer fees, you might as well say that iOS allows sideloading, then.

If an ordinary WP user wants to install an app that hasn't been published, they're out of luck, whether or not they have an SD card.

The criticism was "I can't install apps from third party sources". There was never a requirement to make it particularly user friendly in the OP. If it's a Windows Store application, then XAP sideloading coincidentally is easy. If not, then it's still possible, even if it requires you to be more of a power user.